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lost in translation

Sunshine's picture

this is connected to the work we will be doing with our exhibit and conversations that we've had about language in jody's class. after doing the exercise in class today with the poem, and talking about associations, and then reading more in the book of salt i became interested in how associations in different languages play out. so in the book of salt i saw the french word poulet which means chicken, but my first association in french is pull, which means sweater, but in english my first association with chicken is den. but also because i have a crude understanding of french when i think of pull and then automatically translate it to sweater but then my association is pulls in a sweater. it makes me wonder how a book like this would be translated, or if it could be translated. would it make an ounce of sense in another language? what does that mean for us as we create our exhibit and decide which language(s) it will be in?